Pulling Yourself Into Your Future

Last week at Content Marketing World, I realized a lifelong goal when I met and interviewed John Cleese. Today it hit me: I had planned it all along. I’ll come back to this in a moment so that you can see how that dream fulfilled fits with a talk that I gave at Content Marketing World and a conversation I had with a CMO afterward.

My session at the event was about return on investment and its place in both campaign marketing and content marketing – hardly a place to get all wooey wah wah about esoteric things like creativity and visioning. My point was that we often look in the wrong place for a return on investment in the content we create. The value (the investment), which increases over time, comes from the collection of the content – not from any one piece. A white paper or blog post isn’t nearly as valuable alone as it is in context with the other five or ten or hundreds that make up the whole experience of an industry-differentiating thought-leadership resource.

One brick in a pile is just a brick. One brick in the wall of a house is a key piece of a valuable building.

Want your content marketing strategy to start out on the right (measurable) foot? First, understand what house you’re building. Then – brick by brick – pull yourself toward that future, supporting the other short-term-focused parts of the business (brand marketing, demand-gen marketing, customer service, etc.)